Getting Started

Building of community resilience is an ongoing and cyclical process that incorporates development of a common vision, assessment of current status, priority setting, and taking action. COPEWELL provides tools and resources for each part of this process which can be chosen by communities depending on their needs, resources, and desired approach. These tools are flexible and can be used together or in part. Users should feel empowered to alter tools, concepts, and components of COPEWELL to best fit their needs.

Where to Begin?

First, determine what you are trying to accomplish in terms of assessing and advancing your community’s resilience. Are you trying to compare your progress with your neighbors? Are you trying to get the right people in the room for discussion? Are you trying to design and mobilize cross sector efforts to strengthen resilience? COPEWELL’s suite of tools are not an all-or-none approach; you can choose which tools work best for your circumstances and goals for your community.

We suggest that all users of COPEWELL tools familiarize themselves with the COPEWELL framework in order to orient themselves within COPEWELL’s model for community resilience.

• Resilience is the ability of a community to withstand the impact of and recover from an event. (Resilience = Resistance + Recovery).
• What we really care about is community functioning and how fast the community can get back to at least it’s pre-event level, if not better.
• The model recognizes that pre-event functioning affects post event functioning.
• Several “Domains” (both resistance related and recovery related) impact the shape of the resilience curve.
• Work on these domains and/or on pre-event functioning itself can make a difference in how fast and how well a community recovers.
• This framework is meant to engage people across sectors and allow them to “see themselves” in this work.